Chinese food and Cajun seafood at one restaurant? Yeah, Fresno has that now
One of those lovable quirks about Fresno?
Its 2-for-1 restaurants, like the Chinese food and burger place that used to be in the Tower District, or Christy’s Donuts, proudly also serving Chinese food.
Now Fresno has a new combination restaurant: Chinese food and Cajun seafood.
Jade Garden, a Chinese restaurant at the northwest corner of Shaw and Marks avenues, now has half its menu dedicated to seafood.
“It will be the first of its kind in Fresno,” said Joe Anna Liang, who manages the restaurant owned by her father.
And it’s changed more than just its menu. The interior looks completely different, with the quiet, carpeted old-school Chinese dining room redone with faux bricks, black and red walls and lots of TVs.
The restaurant is in the same shopping center as Target, though across the parking lot, in a strip of restaurants that includes Diana’s Restaurant, Brahma Bull and newcomer Cocina Village.
After four years in business, Jade Garden was facing some challenges. It was hard to find Chinese chefs, Liang said.
The restaurant also isn’t that obvious from the street, she said.
“We’re very hidden,” she said. “If people aren’t going to Target or Stein Mart, they wouldn’t think about coming here to eat.”
So in order to make the restaurant a little more of a destination, they decided to switch things up and become a seafood restaurant. But their landlord wanted to keep a Chinese restaurant presence in the shopping center.
So the result is a compromise: It’s now half a Cajun seafood restaurant and half Chinese.
The menu
New on the menu: crab, lobster, shrimp, crawfish, clams, oysters, mussels, catfish, calamari and more.
You can get fried seafood, including a large whole soft-shell crab for $15.99 and a catfish basket for $11.99.
But where things really get interesting here is the boiled seafood.
It comes out of the kitchen in a plastic bag inside a metal bucket. The sauce and seafood have been mixed up in the bag, which is plopped right on the table.
You can pick from four sauces and four levels of spiciness, from not spicy on up to “XXX” spicy.
You’re given plastic gloves (though you don’t have to use them) and lots of napkins.
“It’s a very fun way of eating. You just eat with your hands,” Liang said. “I would encourage lots of drinking while you’re doing that,” she said.
Beer, wine and sake are on the menu.
The boiled seafood starts around $12.99 a pound for clams, for example, on up. The lobster, blue and Dungeness crab, snow crab legs and king crab legs sell for the current market price.
But it’s the sauces they put on them that Liang and Uie Sun really want to talk about.
“The sauce is everything,” Liang said.
Sun is the mastermind behind the new style of cooking at Jade Garden. She doesn’t claim the title of chef or cook. “Just call me Uie,” she says (pronounced YOU-ee).
She’s the one who introduced Liang and her dad to this type of cooking during their visit to Southern California, serving them lots seafood and plenty of drinks.
You can get sauces like “rajun Cajun,” lemon pepper and garlic butter, but it’s the “whole sha-bang” sauce she really wants you to try.
The whole sha-bang is not a mix of sauces, but a sauce made with Louisiana flavors and Chinese spices – “with some Chinese magic,” as Sun says.
She says the sha-bang sauce is a secret recipe – and she’s serious, she wouldn’t even give us a hint as to what’s in it.
You can also order sausage, corn on the cob, potatoes, chicken wings and sweet potato fries to go with your seafood.
Chinese food
You can still get Chinese food here too. Fried rice, chow mein and orange chicken are on the menu.
The six large combination plates are the most popular.
They include three or four kinds of food each, like the one combo plate for $10.99 that includes pork fried rice, chicken chow mein, broccoli beef and fried shrimp.
This story was originally published November 26, 2019 at 12:38 PM.
